1. Technical Field
The invention disclosed broadly relates to the virtual storage management of real-time computer systems and more particularly, relates to a self-tuning and efficient method for virtual storage management on dedicated real-time computer systems.
2. Background Art
Complex computing systems such as those employed in air traffic control impose many demands on the virtual storage of a computer system. Air traffic control is a process of using radar and other electronic detection techniques to locate and track aircraft flying through pre-determined airspace, to monitor assigned position, coordinate courses to prevent intersection collisions and near-misses and to advise on course corrections to avoid collisions, adverse weather conditions, and for other reasons. A real-time, networked distribution data processing system is designed to process and to integrate the aircraft's measured altitude data, the detection data from multiple radar stations, weather data, and background data (flight information, maps and routes) for screen display to the air traffic controller. Data or buffers flowing through the network and processing facilities represent many virtual storage allocation and deallocation requests during the existence of the data in the system. Stringent system response time and availability requirements under high volume of data, demand an efficient and fast virtual storage manager. In addition, variation of load and functions among each air traffic control site and types of machines translate into different virtual storage requirements. Future function enhancements and changing missions dictate the need for a flexible virtual storage manager. To tune each site/machine becomes costly and impractical. Therefore, what is needed is a method to tune each site/machine automatically to achieve fast allocation/deallocation of virtual storage without interfering with the operation of the real-time computing system.